What are the Noahide laws?

The Noahide laws are seven commandments the Talmud describes as binding on all of humanity, not just the Jewish people — traced to the covenant God made with Noah after the flood (Genesis 9), before the later, more extensive commandments given specifically to Israel at Sinai. The classic list appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 56a: courts of justice must be established; God's name must not be cursed (blasphemy); idolatry is forbidden; forbidden sexual relations (such as incest and adultery) are prohibited; bloodshed is forbidden; robbery is forbidden; and eating a limb torn from a still-living animal is forbidden. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah (Hilchot Melachim 8:11), treats these seven as the baseline of universal morality: a non-Jew who observes them because they are believed to be divinely commanded — not merely because they seem reasonable — is called a "righteous gentile" (chasid umot ha'olam) and, in Maimonides' formulation, has a share in the World to Come. This matters because it establishes, within traditional Jewish law itself, a category of moral obligation that doesn't require conversion or observance of the 613 commandments given to Israel — the Noahide laws are framed as the ethical floor for everyone, while the fuller Torah is framed as Israel's particular covenant on top of that floor. The list is sometimes subdivided differently across rabbinic sources, and Maimonides adds an eighth prohibition (against cross-breeding animals or grafting trees), but the seven-law core from Sanhedrin 56a remains the standard reference point.